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Commissary agency praises service of its retirees

October 17, 2017

The Defense Commissary Agency said farewell to a number of employees who recently retired from federal service, many of them known agency-wide for their valuable contributions to the strength of the commissary benefit, said Acting DeCA Director and CEO Michael J. Dowling.

“We honor these dedicated professionals and thank them for their service in helping us deliver an effective and efficient commissary benefit to our patrons worldwide,” Dowling said. “Some of these folks are living ‘institutions’ of knowledge and expertise, having been here from day one of DeCA’s start as an agency.

“All of them have contributed greatly to our legacy of service, and we wish them the best of luck and happy trails as they move on to life after civil service.”

During August and September, more than 70 DeCA employees retired from government service. Randall “L. “Randy” Chandler, Gordon J. Jones, Rasheed A. Diallo and Dr. Peter D. Skirbunt are among those who recently joined the retiree ranks. DeCA has not made any decisions yet on how it will fill these positions.

Chandler,principal deputy of sales, marketing and promotion, retired Sept. 30 after 31 years of federal service. Chandler was also detailed to the business transformation team, where he helped lay the foundation for ground-breaking changes in DeCA’s business processes that allow the agency to sell private label products and transition from selling products at cost to variable pricing.

During his DeCA career, Chandler served in various leadership positions to include two separate tours as director of sales, deputy region director for then DeCA East and Central Area director.

Chandler is noted as being one of the early founders of the agency’s marketing business unit. During DeCA’s formation, he was a Marine Corps representative to the DeCA Transition Team. From 1998 to 2005, Chandler had left government service to work for industry, returning after seven years to become store administrator at Charleston Air Force Base Commissary, South Carolina.

Jones, deputy director for sales, retired Sept. 30 after 33 years of federal service. Prior to accepting the position as deputy sales director in August 2015, he was director of business development and helped develop and implement the agency’s social media business and e-commerce strategy to include “CLICK2GO”, the agency’s test of online shopping and store pickup capabilities.

Jones began his commissary career in 1984 as store director at Altus Air Force Base, Oklahoma. He later moved to the U.S. Army Troop Support Agency, serving in various headquarters and field assignments within the commissary system, including commissary management specialist, deputy store director at the Fort Lee commissary, and zone manager at Wuerzburg, Germany.

Jones’ headquarters-level assignments included a tour as a supervisory commissary management specialist, where he led the team that deployed the DeCA Interactive Business System and computer-assisted ordering. Jones also worked for the marketing business unit as chief of the perishable markets division. He retired from the Navy Reserves as a commander in January 2011. During his military career, he was deployed as a logistics officer from 2006 to 2007 to Baghdad, Iraq.

Diallo, chief of resource management’s workforce engineering division, retired Aug. 31, after more than 29 years of civil service. As workforce engineering chief, he led a division that determined DeCA’s manpower requirements and their impacts to the agency’s funding. He assumed this position in 2014 after serving two years as chief of DeCA’s financial liaison branch.

Diallo came to DeCA in 2006 from the Army Test and Evaluation Command in Alexandria, Virginia, where he was a senior manpower analyst. At DeCA, he was selected as the agency’s first chief of succession management and program manager of the commissary management intern program.

In 2010, Diallo was deployed to Afghanistan as a member of the first group of DOD civilian advisors assigned to the Ministry of Defense Advisors program, Civilian Expeditionary Workforce. He provided in-depth advisory services to the Afghan Ministry of Interior in support of the country’s 122,000-plus National Police workforce.

Diallo is also an Army veteran who served as a chief warrant officer two in the Army Reserve. Before being in the reserve, he served on active duty beginning in 1986, where he served for 11 years as a human resources specialist in various assignments in Turkey; Fort Knox, Kentucky; the 2nd Infantry Division in South Korea; Fort Belvoir, Virginia; and the Pentagon.

Skirbunt, DeCA’s historian,retired after more than 33 years of government service with the Air Force Commissary Service and later, DeCA. As the agency’s historian since its establishment in October 1991, he has initiated and established an extensive archive on the history of the armed forces’ commissaries.

As a member of the Office of Corporate Communications, Skirbunt produced hundreds of published photographs and discovered and collected several thousand historical photos of commissary operations. Since 1992, he has written multiple news releases for DeCA patrons, articles for agency employees appearing in Vision magazine and DeCA 2020,and has often supplied information and photographs to the private-sector commercial enterprise magazines that cater to the military resale industry.

During his DeCA career, he has also written scripts for, and appeared in, “A Minute of History” videos on the history of the commissaries. These videos have appeared on the Armed Forces Network, the Pentagon Channel, YouTube, the agency Facebook page, and on installation television stations on U.S. bases around the world.

The following is a list of DeCA retirees for August and September, listed in order of retirement date, name, location and years of service: